Yesterday, Heritage Auctions announced their October sale event, “Stallone – The Collection”, which garnered a lot of mainstream media coverage and interest. Strangely, the main marketing piece published was a bizarre, low budget (no budget?) video, which entailed not much more than following Sylvester Stallone around with a video camera (or maybe mobile phone shooting video?) as he seemingly pulls items out of wooden crates at random. Accompanied by bad elevator music, there is no interview or narration or questions or presentation by anyone from Heritage, as they stand around watching him indiscriminately look for pieces to hold up for the camera and come up with anecdotes to fill the silence amid the unidentified, bored-looking spectators surrounding him. I guess some might categorize it as “better than nothing”, but it certainly doesn’t do justice to one of the biggest box office icons of all-time.
Though the video makes it all seem quite boring – like watching someone setting up for their yard sale on a Saturday morning – the auction itself should include some stunning material, direct from the source. It has the potential to be one of the most interesting auctions of the year, but it’s just too bad that Heritage has put none of their budget in promoting it anywhere that can be seen on their website, at least.
The auction is not until October, so there is still time for Heritage to put some effort into giving the event the respect that it deserves, but their landing page on their website looks thrown together, with the graphic at the top of the page being a screen capture from the odd video, with more screen captures at the bottom. You would think that they could have had someone on site with a $500 DSLR to take a quality photograph of Sylvester Stallone. It all just screams missed opportunity. Even ABC News was left to rely on the same video for their own 52 second piece.
Anyway, I make a point of it here just because of the stark contrast of the apparent effort and budget put into marketing set against one of the most notable film actor/writer/producer/directors of our time. Mr. Stallone really deserves better.
In any event, you can check it out for yourself at www.ha.com/stallone:
